The Sucker Punch of the 'Good Enoughs'

Being a therapist is strange. Everyday promises anything but monotony. What will I bear witness to today? What will folks bring into the space? A retched experience with a boss, a horrific, sudden loss of a parent, extra flatulence, a treasured pet snake… the possibilities are colorful.

Today it was a fist fight.

A sibling had apparently met their quota of sly comebacks and the other’s patience had had enough. A sucker punch and some odd swings later they were wrestled apart.
This sounds like something that should phase someone right?

Yet, I sat in my grey, cozy chair unflinching.

“Yikes” was the monotone, stand-alone reaction that floated through my thoughts.
Later that night I remembered the family session and recalled (ethically appropriate) parts of the story to my husband. The inflections embedded within the narrative mimicked one that would mirror a story read in the newspaper about a neighbor lady’s flower garden. A space filler, something worth commenting on but hardly thought provoking.

My husband looked at me with a smirk and said something along the lines of “You should have led with that story when talking about your day.”

In that moment I realized how detached I had been to my day. Something so far from ordinary had become my threshold for normalcy.
Yikes.

I am fairly certain my newly adopted survival technique of muted attachment isn’t a recommended one. I chatter every week about the necessity of ‘healthy’ self-nurturing yet here I sit, leaning heavily into the purgatory of detachment. This fog first set in after the cacophony of pregnancy and postpartum complications I transparently experienced a bit ago. Looking back, it’s quite a phenomenon of how well I was able to ‘pretend’ to function last summer when I was nothing but a faded shell of a well-witted human. I’d put on a mask made of hurriedly- crafted porcelain, only to hurl it toward the wall the moment I exited the therapy office.
I was a mess. A tattered, questionably existing, mess. Cheers to therapy, a fierce tribe, a loving husband, and the promise of change that time doles out.

But the fist fight woke me up to the work I still have ahead of me. My soul is still under construction. My identity hardly resembles a put-back-together-humpty-dumpty. I had quickly glued some pieces in place and accepted that as ‘good enough’.

Aren’t we worthy of more though?

The ‘good enoughs’ aid in our pursuit of survival, yet leave us wobbly on the ledge of anything more. Survival can bring about short-term contentment when that ledge overlooks a calm, comfortable day. Yet, when the winds pick up, we realize how tired we are from holding on so tightly when the weather was nice.

The point of this tangent is to remind you (and me) that our happy doesn’t belong in the ‘good enough’ category. It’s OK to feel tired of wrestling with your hurts, your icks, and your shame spirals. It’s OK to pause the pursuit of joy in trade of a respite.

However, don’t let the respite morph into your normal.

Or else you’ll find yourself snapping out of it in the face of a fistfight.

Duck!